Reading

I finished the last part of Yig Snake Granddaddy by SPCM, a four-part 5e D&D campaign that goes with the SPCM book. While I didn't really like the first campaign that much, Ghoul Island, this one I thought was a much more compelling concept, and it really kind of made me more in the mood to focus on snakes, snakemen, reptilian enemies, alien enemies, etc. The concept is that there's some serpentman dude who's slowly enacting a phased ritual which is "prehistoricizing" an area, bringing back dinosaurs, and, because it's Lovecraft, also bringing back Yithians and Elder Things, and their cities, which were there back in the Mesozoic. The campaign had a few different subthemes, or aesthetics, maybe—part of it was a kind of Lost World or King Kong like exploration of a wilderness full of dinosaurs and other exotic wildlife hazards, part of it was a kind of "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks" with the Yithians in their city, that had very science-fictiony elements. In fact, kind of prosaic science fiction elements, honestly; should have been more alien! But still; not a lot of D&D campaigns tread that particular water, so it was interesting. And there was the "invasions" of the Elder Things city which was more overtly Lovecraftian horror, with their shoggoth break-out going on and all kinds of things like that, as well as the invasion of the city that the serpent-folk were attempting to conquer. 

This isn't really how I imagined it, but hey, a quick Grok prompt, and it's something for some visual interest.

Anyway, while I obviously didn't love every detail, because I never do of anyone else's campaign, this was still one that I found relatively appealing and interesting, and I had more fun reading it than not. This is Saga two of six; I'm not going to start the next one for a little while because I want to read at least another full Paizo Adventure Path (maybe two) and a 5e campaign (maybe two) before I turn back to this again, but the next one is called Dark World and involves getting the characters sent to Yuggoth to be in exile and try and find their way home, I believe. In fact, I can confirm that. I just did a google search (which these days is really usually a Gemini query) and got this AI summary of all of the campaigns in the series, all of which I'll eventually read and discuss briefly here.

The Cthulhu Mythos Sagas by Petersen Games are structured as 4-act massive adventure paths. They are listed below in their chronological release order:

    1. Ghoul Island (Late 2019)

• Core Entities: Ghatanothoa (The First-Born of Cthulhu) and Deep Ones.
• Themes: Apocalyptic dread, isolation, decay, and local cult infiltration.
• Topics: The story starts with a shipwrecked party arriving on the remote, tropical island of Farzeen. It begins as a localized island survival mystery but escalates into a frantic battle against an ancient undead threat. Players must stop a apocalyptic cult attempting to wake an entity slumbering deep beneath the ocean floor.

    2. Yig Snake Granddaddy (2020)

• Core Entities: Yig (The Father of Serpents) and Serpentfolk.
• Themes: Prehistoric survival, lost worlds, and biological devolution.
• Topics: This campaign plunges players into a primordial landscape dominated by dinosaurs, pterodactyls, and ancient reptilian masterminds. The plot focuses on a fanatical serpentfolk cult trying to revert the modern world back into its prehistoric state. Players must navigate primal wildernesses while fighting to maintain their humanity against ophidian corruption.

    3. Dark Worlds (2020)

• Core Entities: The Mi-Go (Fungi from Yuggoth) and the Zepzeg.
• Themes: Cosmic isolation, planar displacement, and techno-organic horror.
• Topics: Triggered by a mad ruler's catastrophic arcane ritual, the adventurers are violently ripped from their home plane. They find themselves cast across the cosmos and marooned on the nightmare alien world of Yuggoth. The saga handles themes of survival in a physically hostile environment under the unsettling observation of the insectoid Mi-Go.

    4. The Big Sleep (Early 2021)

• Core Entities: Tsathoggua (The Sleeper of N'kai).
• Themes: Political instability, global doom, and pervasive lethargy.
• Topics: Cultists threaten to unleash a worldwide curse that plunges civilization into a supernatural, un-awakening slumber. Players must navigate the fracturing political landscapes of kingdoms and empires to assemble an army. It culminates in an active, macro-level war to prevent the ravenous Great Old One from consuming all living things on Earth.

    5. Have You Found It? (Mid 2021)

• Core Entities: The King in Yellow (Hastur).
• Themes: Paranoia, political intrigue, and infectious madness.
• Topics: Confined almost entirely within the massive metropolitan city of Tiarazan, this campaign leans heavily into social investigation and urban mystery. After a series of minor local disturbances, the glowing Yellow Sign appears upon the moon, spreading madness through the populace. Players navigate high-society political treachery and dimensions-warping architecture to stop a young aristocrat's nihilistic plot.

    6. Skin Deep (Early 2022)

• Core Entities: Deep Ones and shifting eldritch infiltrators.
• Themes: Psychological espionage, murder mystery, and hidden rot.
• Topics: The campaign starts as a tense murder investigation tracking a legendary serial killer who seemingly vanished eighty years prior. As clues unfurl, players discover that a shapeshifting race of monsters has deeply infiltrated the governments of rival human kingdoms. The plot shifts into a gritty gauntlet of war mitigation, political maneuvering, and weeding out invisible monsters hiding in plain sight.

Anyway, of that batch, the next one is actually the one that I'm least excited to read, but we'll see. I didn't expect to necessarily like Yig Snake Granddaddy, but that may partly be based on the incredibly stupid name the campaign had. And yet, I found it rather charming when all was said and done, and although I couldn't help but think about how I'd change it, the fact is that while reading it, my mind was often fired up thinking about how to use some of that material that I was reading, so that's exactly what I want to read these things for in the first place, right? It's also interesting to read someone else's take on elements that were very prominent in the Freeport material (serpentmen, Yig, etc.) yet done somewhat differently.

I still believe that, contrary to first, immediate ideas, it's better to do Lovecraftian themes without really borrowing specific Lovecraftian stuff. Yithians and Elder Things in the jungle felt kind of hoaky and fan servicey rather than anything else, honestly. But if they'd been, say, mind flayers and aboleths, done suitably creepy, it could have been just as good if not better, in spite of their prominent nature in D&D. Of course, it's no secret that D&D has always borrowed a lot of elements from the Lovecraft circle... just as it's no secret that it essentially divorced them from their context and just made them monsters. The refrain is that it was up to the DM to make them creepy, if that's what you wanted them to be, but the reality is that hardly anyone ever really thought of them that way.

And these SPCM Sagas, while overtly and heavily Lovecraft Circle influenced, don't really do the themes very well either. It's D&D. You're meant to be, to borrow the TV Tropes expression, "Big damn heroes" saving the day heroically, and at relatively high level, for that matter. The Lovecraftian stuff is more superficial aesthetics than anything else; these are just D&D campaigns. The Dread mechanics are mentioned off-hand several times, but that is just window-dressing too, honestly.

Anyway, so yeah! Paizo Adventure Path (Second Darkness) coming up next, and WotC campaign Princes of the Apocalypse. Then we'll see. I don't want to overcommit on adventure reading. I have other trawls that aren't adventures too that I'll be working in there while I'm doing it.